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Fighting the Right

Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) is preparing for the “Second Annual Ex-Gay Awareness Month” conference taking place this week in Washington, D.C., and PFOX executive director Regina Griggs appeared on today’s edition of “Sandy Rios In The Morning” to promote the event to all of American Family Radio’s ex-gay listeners.

Griggs told guest host Fred Jackson that the group of ex-gay activists will be visiting Capitol Hill because “many, many people within our Congress and in our Senate do not know and have never met an ex-gay, never heard of one.”

According to Griggs, the ex-gay lobbyists will tell members of Congress, “I want you to know that when you consider legislation, when you consider protection, hate crimes, ENDA, we do exist, we are out here, change is possible.”

Griggs, who has a gay son who does not identify as an “ex-gay,” also claimed that homosexuality is a choice, and a “dangerous” one at that.

“It is declared by the individual, it’s a decision that they have made,” she said. “If they have unwanted same-sex attractions that are based on being encouraged to live this lifestyle, many of them make the decision to live in a lifestyle that is changeable.”

She denounced laws in California and New Jersey that bar minors from undergoing ex-gay therapy, which she said will prevent people from receiving “help to walk away from a dangerous lifestyle.”

Last week, after being fired from his job at a food processing plant in Oklahoma, a man named Alton Nolen attacked and beheaded a former coworker. Seizing on reports that Nolen was a convert to Islam who went by the name Jah'Keem Yisrael, Bryan Fischer has now flown into a frenzy that this crime is proof that ISIS is now in the United States.

But it turns out that, according to Fischer, Islam is not solely to blame for this crime as efforts to legalize or decriminalize drugs are also responsible.

You see, Nolen was sentenced to six years in prison on drug charges back in 2011, but was released after less than two. Then, over a year later, he killed a coworker which is why Fischer declared today that he doesn't want to hear any more "nonsense" about legalizing drugs!

"Everybody wants to legalize drugs, we've got to reduce the penalty for drugs, we're over-criminalizing drugs" Fischer said dismissively. "If he had done his full six years ... then Colleen Hufford would still be alive today. So I don't want to hear any more nonsense about legalizing [or] decriminalizing drugs":

You will not be surprised to learn that, contrary to Fischer's position, Nolen's release from prison had nothing to do with efforts to legalize or decriminalize drugs:

He began his six-year sentence for cocaine possession April 26, 2011, records show. Because of plea agreements with prosecutors, he was allowed to serve the three prison sentences at the same time.

He was released on March 22, 2013, records show. Because of credits, he was able to complete all three prison sentences in just two years.

...

Prison records show Nolen was given credit for time spent in jail before prison, good conduct, a transition program and other reasons. One month, he got 151 days total off his time to do, the records show.

One thing was clear at last week’s Values Voter Summit: many of the Religious Right’s leaders and allied politicians know that their stances on abortion rights and LGBT equality are becoming more and more toxic to the average voter, and less and less popular within the GOP.

Many speakers at the conference tried to reframe the debate on issues such as same-sex marriage, insisting that opponents of LGBT rights are becoming an oppressed minority in America. This delusion even seeped into matters such as foreign policy, with speakers attacking President Obama as an Islamist sympathizer who refuses to take military action against ISIS, even while he was doing exactly that.

Naturally, one politician was able to prey upon the many fears and fantasies of the far-right: Ted Cruz.

Even as the Values Voter Summit subtly changed its tone on some familiar issues, five tried and true tactics of the Religious Right were unchanged at last week’s event:

5. Make Audacious Persecution Analogies

While addressing the plight of Christians in the Mideast and people such as Meriam Ibrahim in Sudan and Saeed Abedini in Iran — both of whom are actually the victims of shocking anti-Christian persecution — Values Voter Summit speakers often attempted to claim that conservative Christians face similar abuses and comparable treatment in America.

Maggie Gallagher, the founder of the National Organization for Marriage, told attendees that marriage equality opponents will be “oppressed” due to their opinions, and Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel predicted Big Government persecution of Christians on behalf of “the intolerant homosexual lobby.”

4. Demand Religious Freedom… Except For Muslims

For a conference dedicated to protecting religious liberty and addressing the supposed persecution of Christians in America, there sure was plenty of animosity towards Muslims.

Conference speakers including Michele Bachmann, Robert Dees, Gary Bauer and Brigitte Gabriel dedicated their remarks to the threat of Islam, with several conflating Al Qaeda and ISIS with all of Islam and suggesting that the U.S. government somehow declare war on the religion.

It was surreal to watch several Values Voter Summit speakers criticize President Obama for not going after ISIS at the same time as a U.S.-led coalition was launching a daily torrent of airstrikes against ISIS and the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria and Iraq.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a likely GOP presidential candidate, said Obama doesn’t believe that ISIS leaders need to be “hunted down and killed and destroyed.”

Bachmann declared that the president was ignoring her sage advice on how to handle ISIS: “You kill their leader, you kill their council, you kill their army until they wave the white flag of surrender. That’s how you win a war!”

2. Push Back Against The GOP

There was a palpable fear throughout the conference that the Republican Party is moving away from the Religious Right, as more and more GOP candidates either refuse to highlight the movement’s anti-choice and anti-gay positions or are openly trumpeting support for abortion rights and gay marriage.

Just before the conference took place, Focus on the Family, the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council issued a letter announcing their vow to defeat two openly gay Republican House candidates and the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Oregon, who is pro-choice and running advertisements boasting of her support for marriage equality.

NOM president Brian Brown criticized Republicans for blaming the party’s stances on social issues for losses in the 2012 election. “It’s not our fault,” Brown insisted as he introduced unabashedly anti-gay politician Rick Santorum at the summit.

Later, at a NOM-sponsored panel, Brown accused gay rights supporters of attempting to “hijack” the GOP. While one panel at the summit attempted to explain the potential for libertarians and social conservatives to build a political alliance, it seems many in the audience didn’t want anything to do with the libertarian message.

1. Throw Them Red Meat

Ted Cruz once again won the summit’s presidential candidate straw poll, with Ben Carson, who didn’t attend the summit this year but was well-represented by campaigners from the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, finishing in second place. Cruz and Carson notably outpaced Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, two favorites of Religious Right movement who both spoke at the summit.

Cruz packed his speech with warnings about imminent threats to the Second Amendment and religious freedom, and listing objects of conservative derision: IRS, Common Core and Obamacare.

On Friday, PFAW’s Director of Communications Drew Courtney joined Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC’s Politics Nation to discuss the summit, as well as the Republican party’s ongoing lurch to the right.

“The difference between the fringe Right of the party and the establishment is less and less,” Courtney told Sharpton. “That’s not because the fringe is getting less extreme; it’s because the establishment has been dragged to the right along with them.”

In a column for WorldNetDaily this weekend, Matt Barber reported that although he may be called an anti-gay “hater,” he was in fact “called by God to sound the alarm” that those who die of AIDS are being punished by God for homosexuality.

“The wages of sin is death,” Barber writes. “Yet in today’s upside-down world it is we who are disingenuously accused of ‘hate’ — those of us who remain compassionate and bold enough to warn our fellow fallen human beings of the spiritual, emotional and, yes, even the physical death that comes as a natural consequence of unnatural behaviors.”

Barber isn’t bothered by criticism because he knows God sent him to be an anti-gay activist: “When God calls you to be an instrument of His truth, the biblical harmonies you play will often strike sour with those in rebellion against Him, sending them into blind rage and deep denial.”

Barber, of course, finds it “sublimely humbling to be used of God in this way.”

Scripture admonishes, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Unnatural behaviors beget natural consequences. It is hateful to promote a sin-centered lifestyle to children, to anyone for that matter, which leads to disease, death and, unless repented of, eternal separation from God.

It bears repeating: “[H]alf of all gay and bisexual men will be HIV-positive by age 50.”

The wages of sin is death.

Yet in today’s upside-down world it is we who are disingenuously accused of “hate” – those of us who remain compassionate and bold enough to warn our fellow fallen human beings of the spiritual, emotional and, yes, even the physical death that comes as a natural consequence of unnatural behaviors. A toxic cloud of political correctness distorts reality, choking off any honest appraisal of these self-destructive sexual behaviors. We truly live in a dark age that calls evil good and good evil.

Homosexual conduct is always sin. It always has been. It always will be. It is never good, healthy, normal or natural.

The wages of sin is death.

I’m honored to say that I’m one of those “haters” called by God to sound the alarm. While folks do send me positive and encouraging notes on a regular basis, I likewise receive a steady stream of hate mail – chiefly when I write (or speak) on the issues of marriage, God’s moral law and His natural order for human sexuality.

While the positive correspondence is always heartening, it is, believe it or not, the nasty stuff – the uglier the better – that especially lifts my spirits. Christ’s promises are true: “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake” (Matthew 5:11).

When God calls you to be an instrument of His truth, the biblical harmonies you play will often strike sour with those in rebellion against Him, sending them into blind rage and deep denial. This is a spiritual battle old as time itself. It is between good and evil. It is sublimely humbling to be used of God in this way. All we, all you, as faithful Christians can do is to speak truth in love and pray that those truths plant a seed that bears fruit in the hardened hearts of lost souls.

Shortly after Russia passed its new spate of anti-gay laws, Glenn Beck said he was so offended by one Russian commentator who called for the mass killing of gays and lesbians that he would “stand with GLAAD” against the growing tide of anti-gay bigotry and “hetero-fascism” in the country.

Then, this weekend, Beck took the same stand against growing Russian “hetero-fascism” in his closing speech at the Values Voter Summit, even though many of the summit’s sponsors and his fellow speakers have openly backed harsh anti-gay laws in Russia and throughout the world.

To begin with, Tony Perkins, the president of the summit’s chief sponsor, the Family Research Council, defended Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill when it included provisions making homosexuality a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death.

Maybe Beck was trying to hold Religious Right leaders at the summit to task for their support of brutal anti-gay policies. But if that’s the case, Beck should start confronting them directly when they come on his show, rather than singing their praises and appearing at their conferences while calling policies they support “fascist.”

Jesse Lee Peterson responds in WorldNetDaily today to an Oklahoma man’s beheading of a coworker — there are reports that the man had converted to Islam but no evidence at this point that the crime was connected to terrorism — by asking, “Why are blacks so susceptible to being radicalized?”

Peterson’s answer, of course, is single parenthood, “Marxist-influenced” teachers who “encourage their anger toward America by promoting the lie that their country is ‘racist,’” rap music, the Obama administration, and…black pastors who have “co-opted” the Black Church to “promote racism and are helping to keep blacks angry.”

Why are blacks so susceptible to being radicalized?

The poisonous atmosphere starts in the home. The father is the spiritual head and protector of the family. But with more than 70 percent (in some cities 85 percent) of black children born out of wedlock, that spiritual protection is missing in most black homes.

This opens the door for evil to get a foothold. Children grow up angry at their impatient mothers, who resent the missing father and tend to focus their frustration on the male child. These boys go out seeking love and acceptance from the world.

Once the boy enters the public schools, Marxist-influenced teachers encourage their anger toward America by promoting the lie that their country is “racist.” Couple that with profanity-laced rap music that promotes violence and disrespect for authority – it’s a recipe for radicalization.

The church has been a refuge for blacks throughout their history in America. But today black churches have been co-opted by racist preachers.

For example, at the funeral of Michael Brown, the thug who was shot by a Ferguson police officer, Bishop T.D. Jakes and other ministers eulogized Brown as a saint. This lie only encourages the hatred of whites and police among black youth.

Remember Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., Obama’s minister? Wright’s “God D–n America” and radical “social justice” message is actually a widely held point of view among black ministers. I have interviewed more than 500 black minsters on my radio show. Most of them promote racism and are helping to keep blacks angry.

Blacks are also encouraged to remain angry by so-called “leaders” in this administration.

When Attorney General Eric Holder announced he was resigning, my response was “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” Holder, along with Al Sharpton (the White House’s point man on race relations), has inflamed tensions in Ferguson and across America.

Last week during his address to the U.N., Holder’s boss, Obama, apologized to the world for America’s “own racial and ethnic tensions” and evoked the Michael Brown shooting and Ferguson.

While discussing the Human Rights Campaign’s “Export of Hate” report and what he claims are Right Wing Watch’s misrepresentations of his remarks, LaBarbera said of gay rights supporters: “They’re doing to us what the Nazis did to the Jews.”

“We have to trust in God to protect us,” LaBarbera said, suggesting that criticism of his anti-gay activism is fanning the flames of violence.

“This demonization is just — it’s what’s been done to minorities to the past and like I said, it’s what the Nazis did to the Jews,” LaBarbera added. “We’re losing our freedoms.”

Robert Oscar Lopez is the latest anti-gay activist to attack at the Human Rights Campaign for featuring him in a report on “the export of hate,” writing in the American Thinker today that HRC’s inclusion of him in its report “reveals” that the LGBT movement is “after your kids, plain and simple.”

“They have convinced themselves that gays are a tribe unto themselves, so their consuming goal is to populate the tribe so they don’t disappear,” he writes.

“They want to have children to love them and call them Mom and Dad,” he writes, but “[j]ust because you control a human being doesn’t mean that’s your child.”

He then goes on to compare same-sex parenting to slavery, and LGBT rights activist to the Khmer Rouge.

This is a teachable moment because it reveals a great deal about what makes the Human Rights Campaign tick. They’re after your kids, plain and simple; all their other issues are mere window dressing.

They have convinced themselves that gays are a tribe unto themselves, so their consuming goal is to populate the tribe so they don’t disappear.

Parenthood is their great white whale. They want to have children to love them and call them Mom and Dad. They need to get those children from you because biology prevents them from siring them naturally. Gentlemen readers, these folks are trying to find a way to get the sperm out of your testicles and into their laboratories; lady readers, these folks need to find a way to implant an embryo of their sperm in your womb, keep you obedient during the gestation, and take your baby away forever.

The main item on the gay lobby’s agenda is patently insane. People don’t generally want to let lesbians milk sperm out of their testicles. People don’t usually like the idea of gay men gestating babies in their wombs and then taking them away. (And no, “visitation” plans where these gamete donors get to see their progeny a few times a month are not a good arrangement; that stuff’s really creepy.)

And at least with me, these HRC lackeys cannot pull the old “are you saying my children are worth any less?” routine. Just because you control a human being doesn’t mean that’s your child. Even if someone is your child, criticizing you is not the same as insulting your child. This is basic, but somehow the HRC manages to whitewash the complexities. Despite all the choreographed photographs of happy gay couples with children, people generally do not like growing up and knowing that half of them was sold to a gay couple.

…

That’s the other thing. Not only does the HRC explode into hysteria when they see me traveling to Paris and – gasp! – talking to people in French. They also hate when I bring up history. They love to compare themselves to black people. Their comparisons are vaguely based on their sense that black people were enslaved and held captive, while gay teenagers didn’t get to go to a prom, and isn’t that all a similar kind of suffering? I mean, isn’t the Middle Passage a lot like the pain of not having a bridal registry for two men at Nordstrom’s?

Cursed am I for having studied so much antebellum black literature. I can’t help but point out that black suffering came from a practice of people buying people, and now, because they can’t procreate naturally, homosexuals are buying people and calling them their children. I know, I know – we’re not talking about whips and chains or being forced to harvest sugarcane. But is slavery minus atrociously painful labor no longer slavery?

Wasn’t slaverythe problem with slavery, not all the horrors that sometimes accompany slavery and sometimes do not? The thing itself – buying people like livestock and owning them, no matter how long the contract runs, whether you are a house or field servant – is the evil, not the byproducts.

Notice how I am not using profanity or saying that gay people are going to the fiery place below. I am simply pointing out that the gay lobby is not the first orchestrated movement to rationalize buying people. This is enough to turn them apoplectic. It’s enough to land an obscure little nobody at a Cal State top billing in their paranoid fantasies.

…

According to some historians of the so-called killing fields, in the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge hunted down people with eyeglasses and killed them en masse. They did this ostensibly because they worried that people who were too intelligent might challenge the draconian policies of the government. Fortunately, the Human Rights Campaign has no killing fields, so I and my contact lenses are safe for now. God grant that the awakening of reason come earlier rather than later.

Bachmann, a leading anti-gay Republican, said that “it’s not an issue,” telling Signorile, “In fact, it’s boring.”

The Minnesota congresswoman now appears to be walking back her remarks, suggesting in an interview with WorldNetDaily that she is the victim of a media attack:

In a follow-up interview with WND, however, Bachmann clarified her comments.

“What I said is that this won’t be the issue that drives the 2014 election,” Bachmann said. “I told the reporter it’s getting boring having them only press this issue with Republicans while ignoring Democrats.

“The media loves to divide us on this issue. They look for something all the time,” Bachmann told WND. “I said nothing different. I’m the woman who carried the traditional marriage amendment in Minnesota, and I stand firm in my belief that marriage should be between one man and one woman.”

Bachmann’s aide told WND she wasn’t brushing off the radio host, she was merely making a quick, parting comment as she was leaving.

On his "News With Views" program today, "Coach" Dave Daubenmire asserted that the fact that lots of people do not agree with his right-wing views and positions is a sign that God's judgment is already upon America.

Daubenmire was discussing an ongoing battle between a strip club in Ohio and a local pastor who was been relentlessly working to get it shut down when he marveled that people could actually disagree with the pastor, saying that the only logical explanation for this is that God has sent delusions upon people because this nation has turned away from Him, as stated in 2 Thessalonians.

"Have you ever seen a time in America," he asked, "where common sense was so uncommon? Where people were so willing to look the other way regarding what was right and what was wrong?"

Daubenmire is convinced that this "is the judgment of God that's upon us because we have rejected the truth." God's "hedge of protection" around America has been torn down, he said, and now God's judgment is pouring over the wall and sweeping across this nation.

"It's the natural consequences of rejecting the laws of nature and of nature's God":

On Saturday, a group of Religious Right activists at the Values Voter Summit were pitched on the possibility and necessity of a stronger union between social conservatives and libertarians, a discussion that was heavily tinged with the rhetoric of anti-Christian persecution that dominated the weekened.

In a panel titled “Moral Decline Causes Big Government,” the American Principles Project’s Maggie Gallagher (formerly of the National Organization for Marriage), the director of Rand Paul’s PAC, Doug Stafford, and conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway made their best case for libertarians to adopt social conservative causes — or, given the makeup of the crowd, for social conservatives to be open to an alliance with libertarian conservatives.

Gallagher brought up the Religious Right’s fears about the persecution of conservative Christians by the LGBT rights movement, warning that with the current Supreme Court she was “not optimistic” about preventing marriage equality from becoming law in all 50 states, and that if that happens, there will be “more cases where people are being oppressed…for their views on marriage.”

Libertarians, Gallagher said, should share the concern of social conservatives about gay rights advocates “using the government to impose this new, strange sexual orthodoxy” and their fears of “the horrible things the left is going to do.” She warned that the window for a stronger alliance was narrow, because if LGBT rights advocates succeed, “there’s not a way to build a winning conservative coalition.”

She also made an ideological case for libertarians to join social conservatives, arguing that “the decline of marriage” caused the growth of “pretty much every part of government, besides the defense budget, in America.”

“When the family falls apart, the government grows to step in,” she said.

Conway told the crowd that “values voters and libertarians have a great deal in common” from opposition to “big government” and abortion rights to being “sick of lawyers in black robes making stuff up” to a refusal to “redefine” family to be “whatever feels cool.” She also saw an opening to win over libertarians with the Religious Right’s increasing reliance on persecution rhetoric, or what she called the “assault on religious liberty in so many parts of our culture.”

Stafford echoed Conway, explaining that many libertarians oppose abortion rights and putting in a plug for the two groups to work together and with liberals to end the drug war.

Whatever the few libertarians in the room might have thought of the panel’s appeals, however, the bulk of the social conservative crowd seemed deeply skeptical of any attempt to woo libertarians. The biggest round of applause at the event came when a man came to the microphone, introduced himself as a pastor and proceeded to deliver a soliloquy against such “sins” as homosexuality. In an apparent jab at Sen. Paul’s position that marriage equality legislation should be left to the states, the pastor said, “Don’t let the states decide on marriage. God has already decided!”

As the panel ended, after little discussion of the morality of same-sex marriage, the woman next to me turned to me and shook her head. The panelists, she said, “didn’t listen to a thing that pastor said.”

On Saturday afternoon, Liberty Counsel hosted a panel discussion at the Values Voter Summit on “The Assault of Constitutional Rights Under a Nanny State.” The discussion linked concerns about NSA surveillance – a concern shared by many progressive groups – to the Religious Right’s fear of anti-Christian persecution through the Affordable Care Act and LGBT rights.

Liberty Counsel founder and chair Mat Staver quickly used a discussion about the danger of letting national security agencies collect reams of data to stoke fears about government persecution of conservative Christians.

With the amount of metadata that can be collected off a smart phone, Staver said, “they can actually know that someone was at the Values Voter Summit and list those people as suspect conservative activists.”

“Of course, this administration would never want to do that,” he added sarcastically.

Bringing up fears that the IRS is targeting conservative organizations, Staver said, “I believe every other administrative agency is being used in a very similar way to target the opponents of President Obama.”

When a questioner asked about the danger of the government spying on Christians under the guise of national security, Staver agreed: “Your concern is a legitimate one and we’re going to see more and more of that.”

The bulk of the discussion focused on fears that gay rights will lead to the persecution of conservative Christians.

Staver and Liberty Counsel attorney Harry Mihet pointed to the lawsuit against anti-gay activist Scott Lively by the group Sexual Minorities of Uganda for Lively’s role in crafting draconian anti-gay legislation in Uganda. Staver warned that the lawsuit, which is still pending in U.S. courts, represents an attempt by “the intolerant homosexual lobby” to “punish people who travel overseas to speak on pro-family or pro-life issues in other countries” and to “intimidate” others into not going.

Mihet saw a deeper goal. “The end game plan here is to punish not only speech that takes place overseas but also speech that takes place here in the United States,” he said. “They are not bashful or subtle about the game plan here, this is it.”

They also discussed bans in California and New Jersey on providing “ex-gay” therapy to minors, which Mihet said were part of an “intense and coordinated effort to silence people of faith when it comes to the subject of homosexuality.”

“Folks, we’re talking abut the United States of America, not China, not Russia, not communist Romania where I grew up,” he said, adding that he saw a future where “the only thing that matters is the sexual orthodoxy that the government wants you to adopt.”

One of the more surprising parts of the discussion came when Staver directly addressed the tension between the Religious Right’s call to defy court rulings it doesn’t agree with on gay rights and what it sees as the Obama administration’s ignoring of court decisions that it doesn’t like. “We have the Supreme Court being the ultimate arbiter and everybody abides by that,” he said, but “it wasn’t always that way.” He mentioned that Presidents Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln all bucked court decisions that they felt were wrong. “We’re seeing that in the opposite way today with Eric Holder,” he continued. Although he disagreed with many of Holder’s decisions, he said, “this is something that Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln did back in history.”

How fitting that a conference ostensibly about guarding religious liberty included several speakers who used their time to level attacks against Muslim-Americans, including Brigitte Gabriel of the anti-Muslim group Act! for America.

Gabriel, whose organization focuses on fighting Muslim campus affinity groups and passing dubiously-constitutional laws barring sharia law, claimed in her speech this morning that around 180-300 million Muslims are “radical Islamists who are willing to strap bombs on their bodies and walk into this room and blow us all up to smithereens.”

These days, Erickson lamented, people “worship science” and “believe we were an accident of a primordial goo, particles bumping into each other after the Big Bang that created bacteria that created amoeba that created something that led to something that led to something, a missing link, and then men, somewhere in there there’s a monkey apparently.”

After mocking evolution as dumb and incompatible with the religious faith, even cracking a joke about the Fox series “Cosmos,” Erickson said “I see a world that is opposed to us in this room because we’re headed home to eternity, we’re just passing through.”

“There is a last day, pick a side and the right side wins,” he said, adding: “You have got to love someone enough that you don’t want them to go to Hell.”

“We’re talking about undergoing that change and trying to help other people see that because now you realize we’ve got generations of people in our nation that really don’t understand godliness at any level, they don’t know,” he said.

Later in his remarks, Robertson prayed that the heathens outside of the Values Voter Summit will one day become just as wise and godly as the Robertson clan: “I pray for even our American brothers and sisters who aren’t there yet, I pray for them, because I want our nation to rise up and be great again.”

In their speech to the summit, the Benham twins argued that just as ISIS beheads their victim with a sword, progressive groups like Right Wing Watch “silence” conservatives by quoting them verbatim.

Jason Benham kicked it off by likening himself and his brother to Jesus Christ — a theme throughout their speech — and later David said that Christians in America are facing persecution just like Christians in the Mideast who are coming under attack from violent groups such as ISIS.

“There is a radical agenda that has come in our nation,” David explained, “the weapon of choice for the agenda in the Middle East is a sword, but the weapon of choice for the agenda in America is silence. They demand silence.”

Conservative pundit Mark Levin took the stage at the Values Voter Summit this morning for a conversation with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, in which he told the audience at the far-right conference that they are not the political fringe because there are right-wing political movements that are even more extreme than them, such as neo-Confederates secessionists.

Levin told the audience that they had to fight the effort by liberals to “silence us” with “this PC stuff” and to label them as a “fringe” movement.

“They treat us like we’re this fringe,” he said. “You know, I view the political spectrum quite differently. We’re in the middle! You’ve got the radical leftists who’ve taken over the Democratic Party. And then you’ve got this neo-Confederate group out there that really doesn’t believe in the Constitution and keeps talking about secession and so forth. We are traditional conservatives who embrace the Constitution and embrace our heritage and we need to stand up!”

While addressing the Values Voter Summit this morning, Liberty Counsel's Mat Staver trotted out his favorite claim that the contraception mandate means that America is literally worse than countries like Nazi Germany or Rwanda because those nations never forced their citizens to directly participate in carrying out genocide.

"Now, in America of all places, you and I are being forced to participate in human genocide by the HHS mandate," Staver said.

"We've never been forced in any time in world history to participate in the killing of innocent people and yet today we are," he continued. "No generation has faced what we currently face now ... and we cannot be silent in the face of this tragedy [of] human genocide being forced upon Americans":

Mat Staver spent a good portion of his speech at the Values Voter Summit today fuming over a letter sent by People For the American Way, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and five other civil rights and LGBT organizations to Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, asking members of the GOP not to participate in the conference, citing the anti-gay extremism of its sponsors.

Staver's organization, Liberty Counsel, is among those very sponsors and he is not very happy about being labeled an anti-gay extremist, despite this long and documented record of being one. Staver fumed that he is being attacked merely for believing "in God's natural created order of male and and female and marriage as the union of one man and one woman."

"For me believing in something that is that obvious," he complained, "I am considered by some groups to be a hater. But I hate no one. I hate no one, but I believe in God's truth and I will not be silent in the face of intimidation."

In an effort to prove that he is not an extremist, Staver then went on to liken himself to Jesus when he turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple before declaring that marriage equality teaches that children do not need mothers or fathers.